Talking Biotech is a weekly podcast that uncovers the stories, ideas and research of people at the frontier of biology and engineering.
Each episode explores how science and technology will transform agriculture, protect the environment, and feed 10 billion people by 2050.
Interviews are led by Dr. Kevin Folta, a professor of molecular biology and genomics.
Hi everybody and welcome to this week's talking biotech podcast by Calabra. I'm glad you're here I'm glad you're here because that's what Vance Crowe always says and today we're speaking with Vance Crowe He's the founder and host of legacy interviews and also the host of the Vance Crowe podcast and welcome to the podcast Vance It's really nice to talk to you and nice to have you on the screen and I miss talking to you because every time we get a chance to
Vance Crowe (01:43.553)
Hey Kevin, thanks for having me.
Kevin Folta (01:52.316)
just share ideas things kind of explode and we get a lot of good new stuff going a lot of new juices flowing and I always look forward to that but lately I've listened to a podcast of yours last week and your who is your guest Nicole
Vance Crowe (02:09.001)
Natalie Kovarik.
Kevin Folta (02:10.432)
Natalie Kovarik, okay, and it was really awesome to listen to because you were having a discussion with her and both of you were talking about the same things I've been thinking about a lot.
Only you had a much you articulated it much better than I ever could like you and her together is fantastic And I really wanted to talk to you about it here Maybe expand on some of these same ideas because I think there's a new level of crazy that's permeating and legitimizing itself within the world of science And at least on the social side and so we kind of pick that apart here But before we get going give people a little bit of a sense of who you are you know how you got to where you are now and especially your role as the
Millennial engagement czar at Monsanto
Vance Crowe (02:57.806)
So I don't know how far back to go, but I grew up in small town America and all I wanted to do was get out of there, get away from my farm town. And what I did was I studied communications and then I became a deckhand on a ship. I traveled to Africa to become a Peace Corps volunteer. I worked at the World Bank and then I crazily got this opportunity to interview at Monsanto. And I thought this was hilarious because if there was one thing that's true about all those jobs I had,
everybody knew that Monsanto was evil. And so I ended up taking the interview just because like, who doesn't want to see inside of North Korea? And I did the interview and I all of a sudden realized like, hey, if they let me, if they hire me as the director of millennial engagement, I am going to get to run around and ask anyone anything here that I want. And if I discover that big ag is as evil as everybody says that it is, well, then I'm going to go out and tell the world about it. I'll write the greatest tell all book of all time. And I also realized that like,
If I'm wrong about what I think, then you maybe have just stumbled onto the most important communications problem in the history of modern civilization, which is we're growing food more bountifully than we ever have before. And yet people are afraid and angry about how their food is being grown. So I ended up taking the job that was more than 10 years ago. You and I met, we had all sorts of experiences traveling around the U S Canada, Europe, talking with different groups, trying to get them to open up their minds and their perspectives on
what they thought. I did that until Bear bought Monsanto and then they came to me and said, we love everything you did here. You had huge success. So we want to put you on the executive track. Would you like to go to supply chain or finance? And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I am a communications person. What I love is talking with people. I love understanding how their minds work. I want to know what they've seen about the world, how they know what they know.
Kevin Folta (04:39.214)
You
Vance Crowe (04:51.16)
And so I ended up leaving and I started a company called Legacy Interviews where I now record people telling their life stories as a way to capture who they really are so that the future can know who they were. And so people come in from all over the United States and Canada to my studio here, or we do them online where I ask them all kinds of questions about their lives. But it's really designed around getting them to laugh, getting them to reflect on things, getting them to share those
stories and their feelings that they don't always get to share. So that's what I spend most of my time doing. But I also have the podcast and I continue to go out and speak to a lot of ag audiences.
Kevin Folta (05:28.492)
Yeah, and Legacy interviews is a brilliant idea and it's a source of three major regrets for me because I was going to buy three Legacy interviews and with people who either said, well, I really don't want to do it or well, maybe try it next year or I'm too busy and didn't do it and didn't force them to do it. And all three of them are gone now. one of them or one of them was my dad. Another one would add awesome stories.
You know, mean, it just was one of these things that, you know, we heard the tales every Thanksgiving, you know, and it would have been good to cement them for future generations. So it's not just like a shameless plug for your business because you're here. You know, just realistically, it's a great idea that I wish I would have taken advantage of. So, yeah.
Vance Crowe (06:16.751)
Yeah, you know, I had an uncle who was my, you know, hero. was the guy that told all these great stories about being a pilot and, my cousin and I just didn't work out the details. We kept putting it off. We didn't do it. And then when we finally did do it, his memory wasn't there. And so there was a lot of gaps and I really feel that myself. And so I always tell people, if you're thinking of regret about somebody you didn't get, then stop that and actually think like, well, who can I get? Who is somebody that I want to make sure we capture and do that? Cause we can't go backwards, but we can.
learn from whatever happened.
Kevin Folta (06:49.442)
Hope
Despite a lot of similarities that we share in terms of our interests and our interest in agriculture and agriculture communication, one of the things that's backwards is that when they wanted to move you from communications and the finance, you said no, because I'm more interested in the human brain and how people make choices and what people's perceptions are and how we shape that. I stumbled into that backwards because I'm a basic researcher. I work at the bench. I'm a molecular biologist and I started
to realize how interesting humans are both themselves but also as parts of groups and how groups function and how information flows within those groups and really started realizing my failures as a communication person because I wasn't acknowledging how people actually receive information. So we both kind of got to the same place through very different routes but one thing I think we're sharing right now is kind of the emergence of rather a dark
pseudoscience that's always been there in the background but is really starting to get a toll hold in agriculture. Can you take us down that road a little bit in terms of what you've seen?
Vance Crowe (08:02.556)
Well, when we were working, when I was working at Monsanto and you and I interfaced because I was trying to find other scientists that could go out and talk about, you know, the value of genetic engineering and why we use pesticides. There was definitely this collection of people that were making waves that really got to the broader public. Of course, there were the things like the millions against Monsanto and the people that would come out with the GMOs with the syringes and the
you know, weird looking fish and corn with, you know, fangs on it, that kind of stuff. But out of that cropped a few people that were influencers. And at the time, social media wasn't new, but it certainly wasn't as sophisticated. was the the middle of the population was not on social media. They definitely didn't understand. And so a couple of people really raised to a level where
other people were really listening to them. And this would be specifically people like Vani Hari or RFK. And so these people were out saying, let me tell you about what's hidden in your food. Let me tell you about what's the dangers that are facing you that's out there in agriculture. And at the time, agriculture, big companies like Monsanto, even the academic world were completely unprepared for being hit by this. They had no...
inoculation against it. And so they just got completely obliterated and it took them years to actually get reorganized and say, no, no, no, wait, wait, we have to put our own people out there to find an effective way to get messages out there. But the people that were doing this, people like RFK and Vani Hari, who goes by the food babe, one thing that they had that was a massive advantage was that they were actually deriving money.
from making people afraid, from building up a reputation around what they were talking about. And the other people, the people in Ag, the people for corporations or academia, they were doing this as a part of their job. And so it really took several years of effort to try and say, how can we interact? How can we get our ideas to spread? How can we make our ideas more viral? And the work that I really focused on, which was how can you get groups
Vance Crowe (10:18.599)
that are normally not connected, connected to one another. So for example, the skeptics community was really big. They were trying to debunk pseudoscience, but they didn't know any farmers. So I would try and work with the skeptics group, like the League of Nerds, and introduce them to somebody like Rob Sharkey, so that that way ideas could jump over from one tribe to another. They could hybridize. They could be perfected to their own groups.
and then spread out. And this was a very effective way of competing against this. And then we watched that group or those groups eventually give up on the GMO fight and focus far more on the glyphosate fight. And then during COVID, a lot of this went down. And now we're coming to seeing like, we always knew there would be a wave that would come back and now we are clearly seeing it.
Kevin Folta (11:07.896)
Yeah, some of the other major differences between the pseudoscience folks, so the Vaniharis, the RFKJs, and all the other collection of influencers, as they say, that have come along with them and found home in the space, is that, as you mentioned, they do it as a full-time job. Academics were doing it as part of our job, but were also discouraged from doing it. And I was on the talk earlier today with physicians who at their institution were told
stand down from talking to anyone about COVID because it is contrary to what their governor wants. And so when you're in state institutions, there's actually a fear to go out and engage to counter the false information. And the other big one is, is that we have to tell the truth. And whether they know it or not, they're not being accurate when you're talking about the folks who are spreading these southern information. What was the big deal a couple weeks ago in DC? Did you
follow that at all.
Vance Crowe (12:09.619)
Yeah, I didn't watch it as closely as Natalie, my guest on the podcast did, but RFK, when he made the transition over to Trump and said, look, you may not like Donald Trump, but you can vote for me and what I'm working on instead of Kamala Harris. And one of the things I'm working on is the health of the nation. And he's pointing out things that are obviously true. These are very apparent, very large problems. Obesity.
mental health disorders, people having all sorts of other issues internally, things like erectile dysfunction and other issues. And they're saying, we want to figure out what's going on here. We think it's attached to the food system. And this is what we believe it is. So they brought a lot of people that were influencers in the space to talk about their own perspectives. People like the woman from Biggest Loser.
to other doctors. And this is, I can think representative of a larger movement that's gaining traction. People that have gone on Tucker Carlson's show, that have gone on Joe Rogan, pointing out, hey, there is a real problem and everyone agrees there is a real problem. And then their conclusions for fixing it are oftentimes, it's the glyphosate in our food, it's other things that big food are doing, putting into your food that are dangerous.
Kevin Folta (13:27.756)
Yeah, that's exactly it that they're kind of hitting the nail on the head and identifying the problem but jumping to conclusions that are in concurrent incongruent with what the scientific consensus says or what at least where there is no evidence for us to be able to make a conclusion scientifically they seem to have jumped to that conclusion and are very comfortable with that conclusion and that's a real problem because what's really ironic about this this was pointed out by Dr. Andrea love I don't know if you know dr. Love
She's fantastic. She was talking to her yesterday and she said, all these folks who are in this space, so many of these influencers, they all sell a supplement. They are not physicians and not scientists for the most part. They are selling unregulated supplements that you can buy online. And then they're going and telling the, saying that the FDA needs to have more regulation on food.
It's just so much irony that they're calling for more regulation while selling unregulated products and saying supplements should be part of our health care situation. But why is it that this gains any traction? Because here they are doing a talk in front of Congress. How does this sell and why do so many people online vehemently defend them by saying, we need to vote Trump now because we need RFK in?
Vance Crowe (14:52.084)
I think that it gains traction because I think there's truth in what they're saying. And I think that it is something that the scientific community is again unprepared for like a change in culture and a change in society. There is, it is so obvious to everyone that looks around that obesity is a massive problem. And all of the answers that people have been given that were
know, quote unquote scientific things like, you know, nutrition science have all shown to be utter failures in the world that we live in. And so science can come out and say, Hey, we've isolated these particular parts of this experiment to help us figure out what is nutrition? How does this work? How does parts per million of different products in our food? But the reality is there
What is going on is so complicated that nobody really knows the answer. Science tries to isolate things and they're saying, well, even if we can't prove it with evidence, we can say that the result is that negative things are going on and something should change. And frankly, everyone listening to this, you and I included, agree something has to change. The question is, what is it that needs to change?
Kevin Folta (16:12.578)
Yeah, we all love a mental shortcut. So when someone says, well, obviously it's to glyphosate in the food. You know, people have been doing this for years from thimerosal and vaccines to, you know, baby powder, everything else. There's always a chemical boogeyman that you can blame all your problems on. And that's always been really surprising to me, but that's always been kind of owned by the political left. And I know that you and I have just gotten so much grief from NGOs and people who, you know, as a left leaning professor, probably
align with really well and yet they were after me and still are in many cases but now we're seeing this more and more on the political right and so what's going on there?
Vance Crowe (16:55.232)
Yeah, I call this the flippening that that occurred. So when we were out trying to say, hey, different tribes that are out there, you should start to think about this in a different way. Your fear of GMOs and your fear of glyphosate. Maybe you should listen to, you know, the skeptics or the pragmatic environmentalists like the eco modernists, these different groups that are out there.
You should try and listen to them and maybe they will have a convincing way for you to think about the value of using these technologies. When that was going on, it was the left that was afraid of big pharma. They were afraid of large government. They were the ones that were trying to say, hey, healthy eating is the absence of many things. And then COVID hit. And actually, I think this was well happening before COVID happened.
I think that everybody can clearly see that academia is definitely left leaning. So academics were told, hey, this is the way we're thinking about things. And then when COVID happened, all of a sudden people were saying, you need to trust the science. The science is the most important thing. And the science says we should wear masks. And the science says that these mRNA vaccines are going to work this way. And the science says X, Y, and Z.
And then as time went on, people found out either A, the science didn't say that, or B, they are drawing radical conclusions vastly further than they ever should have. And yet it was implemented on the public. And so the people that were on the right were looking around saying, wait a second, the trust that I had given as a farmer, as a person on the right,
to government seems to be violated. I am no longer on team what the government says, what the regulatory bodies say. I'm not doing that. And the left had been moving more and more towards, trust the science, science is the academic world. And so you had this political inversion. And so the big thing that this is causing, I think, one of the things prompting you and I to talk about this is I've been saying, hey, ag,
Vance Crowe (19:08.308)
you used to have a political home that would help you protect your GMOs and some of your crop protection tools. And that was that the conservatives were on your team. And now they are not on your team, they are actually leaving and ag is going to find itself with no political home to go and say, Hey, let us show you what evidence we have that glyphosate is safe and that we should be using these technologies. There's going to be nobody on their team. And I think that these because as a result of this flippening
You're going to start watching technologies get banned and taken away from farmers and there'll be nobody there to slow the thing down.
Kevin Folta (19:42.848)
Yeah, well let's talk about that on the other side of the break. We're speaking with Vance Crowe. He's the founder and host of Legacy Interviews as well as the Vance Crowe podcast. This is the Talking Biotech podcast by Calabra and we'll be back in just a moment.
Kevin Folta (20:22.764)
And now we're back on the Talking Biotech podcast. We're speaking with Vance Crowe. He's the host and founder of Legacy Interviews, as well as the Vance Crowe podcast, which you should listen to. Last week's was really well, shouldn't say last week's. The recent one with, keep wanting to call her Natalie, Nicole Kivorek. No, all right, Natalie Kivorek. know, it's tough being married to a Natalia. You get them all mixed up. Okay, well, we were talking about glyphosate.
Vance Crowe (20:40.971)
Natalie, Natalie Kvorak.
Kevin Folta (20:53.269)
where has the situation specifically regarding glyphosate gone, especially with all of the legal buzz around that particular herbicide?
Vance Crowe (21:05.828)
Yeah, I haven't followed as closely as I have when I was working at Monsanto. But from what I watched happen was when the first class action lawsuit occurred and they were handing out a billion dollar settlement, then all of the money that had been poured into anti GMO was instantly evaporated. That money stopped and it went towards the money to
to attack glyphosate. Now, as you're probably take a step back, because if people are not aware of how the system works, there are groups of people out there that not only are they attorneys for a class action lawsuit, but this is actually big business. When you want to do a class action lawsuit on the national level, you get together a group of investors, they give you a little bit of seed money, and then you go to conferences in New York City or Las Vegas, and you go to one of these convention centers.
and you can go up and down the aisles and there's all these people with booths saying I've gotten together X number of people that are going to be plaintiffs on this lawsuit. I believe that we can get it even larger if we get investments so we can put up billboards and do late night television ads for this. So we can if you will invest money here we'll take that money and grew the grow the pool of the number of people that want to do this class action lawsuit. And then
will if they win, you'll get a percentage of that winning. So it's a form of investment or a form of gambling, whatever you want to call it. Well, this is brought in huge amounts of money. And at the time, it was that money that was being invested into things like anti GMO was being funded by the kind of PR firms that are out there that are around nature. So Greenpeace, you you could think of it as an activist group, or you could say actually, they're really sophisticated PR firm.
that works on behalf of whoever's paying them. Those groups were having all of their energy routed towards anti-GMO. The billion dollar lawsuit comes in. say they take in about face all of that money that was going into anti-GMO now started going into glyphosate. They won some cases, they lost some cases, but this created a huge amount both of money to be gone after. And then also it gave even more cover, more ideas for people to say, look,
Vance Crowe (23:20.206)
it seems obvious to me that there are courts now that are coming out and saying X, Y, and Z about glyphosate. So therefore, it makes sense that I would say that or I would believe that. And I don't think you can fault people in any way for that. They don't have the time and the energy to be able to go and analyze things. So they trust the jury of their peers to do that. And that's where we're at now.
Kevin Folta (23:41.902)
Yeah, and that's a complex ball to unwind. I mean, I've been studying that stuff for 35 years that I've been reading the glyphosate literature and looking at glyphosate tolerance and understanding what it is and isn't in all the papers that show risk and where risk really is. And I know the drawbacks of what that stuff does. I understand its environmental impacts and resistance and all those things. And I can tell you all about it. But there's so much nuance in that, that the average person that just sees a court case handed down that instantly
decides it for them. And so that's where this we're shifting from going after the GMO after the crop to going after the chemical was so brilliant because it's easy to go after the chemical because it's a chemical. It's easy to go after Monsanto because the perception. And so this was a real no-brainer and I can totally see how this got so much traction. Do you have any sense on where that's going next? mean how
How does a company survive this? And how is this being woven into the whole narrative from the RFKJs and the Vanihares, et cetera?
Vance Crowe (24:53.338)
I mean, candidly, I think that it is a near certainty that chemicals will be banned. And if they can ban glyphosate, anything else can be banned. is no cover for anything. And I think there's not going to be any politicians. The corporations won't have enough money to lobby these politicians to keep it going. All of that energy that had gone into the crop protection
groups and the lobbying that went on and the advertising like right now I think there's very little appetite for it. So unless there's some individual that then can collect together a big group of people to start pushing back on this, I think I would say it is almost a foregone conclusion that if we fast forward the clock five years, we're going to see a massive amount of things banned regardless of who's in the White House.
Kevin Folta (25:46.072)
Yeah, well, because if you lose glyphosate, you lose everything. And that's I've been saying that for years. Glyphosate is the most non-toxic agricultural input with no evidence or very scant evidence of harm. Certainly affects on water communities. Certainly some places we can point to where if it's used too much, it can be problematic, but actually a really safe chemistry. And so if we lose glyphosate, where do they go from there? I mean, what happens next?
Vance Crowe (26:15.731)
I don't know. I think it's worth exploring this conversation about glyphosate and its safety. Because I had a really jarring experience when I was at Monsanto that kind of woke me up to something, which happened with a scientist named Doug Sammons. We had gone to some college campus, and the kids were asking us questions about glyphosate, and some of them getting kind of rowdy. And we got done, and Doug and I were talking, and I was like, Doug.
Can you believe these people don't believe that glyphosate is safe and like that it's something that we can trust? And he said to me, well, know, Vance, you don't actually know that. You know that I know that I'm the one that's read the papers. You may be have thumbed through one, but you don't actually understand any of this. And that the reality is you're just trusting me. And that really hit me. And at first it kind of hurt my feelings. And then it made me realize like,
I am no different and actually all of us are no different from this. Almost everything we know to be true is actually what our tribe of people says is true. And it's what allows us to get along with other people. It allows us to like be like, all right, well, I follow these rules and I believe these things. And so this is going to become incredibly complicated as to what happens next and who believes in what. And really,
whether you're talking about it from Vani Hari's perspective or you're the scientific perspective, at some point, most of what we're going to make decisions on is based on faith. And that faith is, do I have faith that the scientists are telling me the truth? Do I have faith that this person that's beautiful and has a very clear message and, you know, seems to have a life that I would want to have? Maybe that's the person that I should have faith in. And so I think that while
scientists want to keep the conversation about the science. The reality is that this is a conversation about faith.
Kevin Folta (28:13.634)
Yeah, you say faith, I mean, does it really mean trust?
Because I mean, is it two different things, right? Or because you say faith, that you're putting your belief in somebody's position because you trust where they're coming from. Earlier today I gave a talk on the trust deficit, that we don't have an information deficit, we have a trust deficit. And that the reason people choose alternative medicine in a hospital, the reason people opt out of chemotherapy is because they trust the person online more than they trust their own physician and Pfizer.
how do you get the trust back? That was what we talking about. But it boils down to, who are you willing to have faith in or whose messaging do you trust? And this is where we get to a really interesting question. Because I think if you look across the plains, right now in the presidential race, farmers tend to lean very right and be very conservative. And they will inevitably this term in many cases vote
for Donald Trump who will appoint RFKJ, will it affect farmers to know that if they, and this is, I'm really interested in this, how will it affect them to know that if they vote the way they do, they may be voting to have one of their most important inputs that allow them to farm profitably taken away?
Vance Crowe (29:44.798)
I mean, I don't see it as quite that obvious that Trump will lead to glyphosate being banned any faster than the Kamala Harris White House. And not to be political, but I think that ultimately what is going on is what do people believe? What do moms believe? What do people that are going to the grocery store, what are the people like, what is it that they are believing?
without evidence, which is why I say faith as opposed to trust. actually think it's more complicated. think faith is a network of trust that is guiding your principles. And we all have faith in something. And trust is one of those things where you're like, all right, you know, I think that trust is maybe it's kind of like science, right? You can only test one thing at a time. You really have trust in one thing at a time. Faith is actually describing a network of trust.
that allows you to kind of define and figure out the way forward. And I think that we've all lost faith in our institutions. And the people that are right now saying, no, no, no, the institutions are working fine.
They don't actually believe that you look at your bank account and you say, well, it's worth far less than it was a few years ago. I don't have trust in my money the way that I used to, or I don't have faith in my money. I don't have faith in the food system or the way the insurance is working. We are all losing faith in all of our institutions. And I think there's no way to stop the nothingness. so I don't actually, I know this isn't a very positive message.
But I think that it's one that should be stark because I think people are going to think like, last time it got kind of shaped up and figured out. This time is a very different one because I think there's much more institutional decay around the world.
Kevin Folta (31:42.03)
I'm with you 100 % on the political side on this. mean, we know that Cory Booker has been front and center in posing glyphosate. He's been instrumental. He wanted to run for president. His wife produces a lot of media that is anti-glyphosate and anti-conventional farming. So, not to pick on the right side. I just think the right side is a little more interesting because I can't quite fathom whether or not farmers would be willing to go along
along with a Kennedy telling them that what they're doing is wrong.
Vance Crowe (32:17.278)
I mean, I think that when I go out to talk with ag audiences, there are a lot of moms that are super health conscious and they are watching on social media and hearing these things about glyphosate and they're looking around at the world and they're saying, people are morbidly obese. dementia and Alzheimer's is going through the roof and maybe these things that we're doing aren't right. And I think you're going to see a ton of internal pressure. I think there's going to be a bunch of
wives of grain farmers that are going to say, maybe we shouldn't be using this. Maybe I don't want my kids around this. And the evidence that they are basing this off of is that they're just believing their eyes. They're opening them up and looking around and saying something's wrong. the husband's not going to be like, no, no, no, look, the EPA says it's fine because he doesn't believe in the EPA either. I mean, faith is crumbling all around and I don't know where this goes.
Kevin Folta (33:13.784)
Now that's a really interesting take, that if you don't believe in any of the faith, let's say if you don't have faith in any of the institutional guidance that's around us, then you're totally beholden to precautionary decisions that...
provide a sense of security within your four walls. Because at the end of the day, that's what we do. And so whether you're, and I totally agree with you on that. I think it's shaping up in a very strange way to be able to do that. But what happens when we lose inputs like glyphosate and then the next one down the line and the next one down the line, where we basically can't farm at the low cost that we can farm now? What happens next?
Vance Crowe (33:59.326)
Your guess is as good as mine. think that there's going to be this, know, weird, weird things can happen during chaotic periods. If you want to read the most interesting parts of human civilization in history, you just go and find like the institutions were working, they broke up. Well, what did humans do? You know, you may see a massive increase in the amount of labor that's required for growing crops, which will then increase the prices. And then all of sudden people can't eat as much food.
Who knows how that will work? I think that the book that most accurately described this is one that'll probably be very outside of the norm for your audience. It's called the book called The Mandibles. And this is about, it's kind of like a Stephen King apocalyptic story, but it's about what happens if the economy just crashes and burns and what happens then.
And essentially in the book, they talk about, when no more innovation is happening because the economy doesn't work, then not only do we not progress forward, we actually regress backwards. And it's an astonishing book. I know it's fiction, but it's actually a really, really good read and it will scare the hell out of anybody that reads it.
Kevin Folta (35:12.715)
Yeah, but you don't even have to go to fiction. I mean look at the lysenkoism and many other times around agriculture where revolution or change really led to the demise of farming and agriculture and famine. I mean there's I think history is punctuated with those events.
Vance Crowe (35:29.308)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just look at the the Kulaks in in Soviet Russia, right, where all of a sudden they were seen as being these wealthy people. So they moved them all off the land, starved them to death. And then when they were trying to grow their own crops, it was a total and utter disaster. And famine is a real thing. people will gleefully they will cheer as they do these terrible things to to farming. But in saying all this,
Like I have to say that I, after leaving Monsanto, had, you've listened to my podcast for a long time. I had a guy named Laszlo Barabasian, who's the guy that studies networks. And he really had a very fascinating concept of, I don't think you can isolate any one thing and say, Hey, at the parts per million of this particular product, it's safe because actually the way that chemistry largely works is as networks and particularly biology is networks upon networks upon networks.
And he was saying, essentially, like, maybe we shouldn't have as much faith in these very narrowly defined scientific studies, and that we have to look at things in a very different way. And I think he's right. I think he's got a really good and important point here that is hard. It was hard for me to hear at the time. And I think it's going to be really hard for the scientific community to look at, because you'll say, well, yeah, but we can't isolate and do a really good study on
Networks in that way. It's too complicated and I think that that's right and probably should prompt all of us to be very humble because I think one of the reasons that we the People have lost faith in their institutions is that the institutions were not humble they were arrogant and they use the trust that people had in them and they broke it and That now we need to come up with a new way to build rebuild that faith
Kevin Folta (37:16.174)
Yeah, actually, I had dinner with Lazlo in Budapest one year, and we talked about this. Same kind of concept. Evan, I think you're right. And then when you start putting the social overlays on this and the networks of social interactions and throw people into it, it throws the whole cart off 100%. And so scientists have underthought this because we can only isolate reductionist elements effectively in the laboratory and try to glue them together in networks. We're trying to get there, but it's much too complicated for
when we don't know how all the pieces of the 747 work you can't make it fly and so I think that's really where we're at. other thing you mentioned... yeah.
Vance Crowe (37:51.628)
Yeah
Vance Crowe (37:57.362)
Can I say something that's popped into my head? This is something I could not say when I was at Corporate America, right? This did not be acceptable, but since I work for myself now, one of the biggest advantages that the activists had is that they are beautiful. It is very, very rare that you ever look at an activist and say like, that guy, he doesn't have anything going for him that I want. When I looked at what...
Kevin Folta (38:03.563)
Okay.
Vance Crowe (38:24.278)
Monsanto or agriculture was putting out there. Oftentimes our spokespeople were not necessarily people that you aspired to be like, and they weren't people that you were saying, well, what are you doing? Cause I want to do more of whatever that is. And I think that that's something that never got brought up because it's embarrassing. And there are people that were representing different corporations that like they were not, they didn't look aspirational. And that is where people will put their faith because it looks like proof of work.
Kevin Folta (38:33.922)
Mm-hmm.
Vance Crowe (38:54.254)
Science can be proof of work, right? If you not only do the model test studies, but you actually run it out and you do it at large scale and you aren't just doing in small tests, but big, that's proof of work. Well, what the population is basing their faith on is the proof of work of that person looks beautiful and I want to look more like that.
Kevin Folta (39:13.806)
You know, you may be onto something there. I know that years ago, I had my students tell me, I don't want to be like you. I mean, and this is my students who appreciated me. And, but they said, you put in too many hours, you don't have a life. All you do is work. And, you know, I would come into the out, look into the lab 24 hours a day, and you're sitting here, you look funny, you smell funny. You don't look like you haven't washed your hair in a month. You know, they would tell me these things. Like, can we get you lunch? You know, but.
Vance Crowe (39:41.63)
You have one leg shorter than the other. It's all.
Kevin Folta (39:43.81)
I do have one, have very much so. the funny part is that that was a little bit of a different chapter ago and things have changed a lot for me. Being a parent and everything else, my number one job now, my favorite job is being a dad. And that's where I really like being. But back to what you were saying, it is hard to capture the public's interest and be a role model when we have no training in role modelism.
and none of us are models in our roles. And I think that makes a big difference. And the touch on something else that you mentioned there about the arrogance of science, and I don't want to let this go because you mentioned it, I think you're really onto something. One of the big problems with COVID and other scientific proclamations is the certainty by which uncertainty is sold. Because the public wants certainty. They want to know yes or no, this is going to kill me or not, or it's safe or it's not.
And we can't say that. We can't say there's no risk. We can only say risk is very minor, you know, but that but we don't have a handle on risk as a public. It's very, very hard that science has to deal with slippery concepts. Whereas if you're an activist, you can, you you've got a wonderful, gorgeous messenger, and then you have someone who's very well versed in communication. And then you have somebody who can peddle certainty without any kind of penalty. And so I think this is really another
real hindrance of how we have to do our work.
Vance Crowe (41:16.25)
Well, this is something I really learned the nuance from you. You you would caveat things. It was something that you were very, very good at. And I think that part of the flippening occurred when the government got involved with science and the government was able to say things with certainty because they could say, hey, vaccine manufacturers, there is no liability for you. So if something does go wrong, you are not going to be held liable. And this enables us to say,
We know with certainty that this is going to be better for the population than not. And they forced people or came as close to forcing people as they could to take vaccines. And now looking back, we're like, well, we discovered more than we knew. And maybe there is some things that weren't exactly right. But because the government and science got together, that created a crossing of streams that created this arrogance that ultimately was deflated. Because one of the reasons you have to have nuance is because if somebody finds
one outlier, one thing that isn't the exact way that you said. Now you do have to backtrack on what you said because you said it was certainty. And this is something that I think when science and government get together, it is a bad thing because the government's going to be like, no, no, come on, guys, we can be certain about this. Whereas the scientists would not on their own be that way.
Kevin Folta (42:37.004)
Yeah, and as my dad used to say, it only takes one aw shit to get rid of a thousand attaboys. and and on and it's very true. One of the things that I really, really I threw so many things at the TV with Warshawski and Fauci talking about the certainty of something that was highly uncertain and how that would just break the trust with the public. And the other big part of that, you know, this is maybe a whole nother episode is that you don't you can't
Vance Crowe (42:43.39)
Hahaha
Kevin Folta (43:07.4)
Force people into doing the right thing if they're not willing if they don't see the popcorn trail if you can't lay out the moral and ethical imperative To do take action in a certain way and you do it convincingly don't make people do stuff It just makes them mad and it makes them resentful and they'll never forget and then they're skeptical when the next pandemic comes and you have a solution and now it's like MERS where you got a 33 % fatality rate and they say no, we don't trust where you're coming from
Vance Crowe (43:23.833)
and they'll never forgive you for it. Never.
Kevin Folta (43:36.834)
So it's really important to get on top of. kind of getting back to the beginning, this is where all of this noise around agriculture and agricultural chemistry, pseudoscientific remedies, and really what is becoming, in addition to the flippening, a legitimization of...
bad science and weak science and pseudoscience and I guess maybe the last thing to think about is you know how does how do folks like Vani Hari and this cast of RFK folks how do they get in front of Congress and have the time to talk to them where scientists are only in front of Congress when they're being grilled for malfeasance?
Vance Crowe (44:23.881)
I don't know, man. It does not appear obvious to me that scientists doesn't have access to the machinery in the same way that the activists do. You know, I actually probably sit in some third category more of like the consumer because I'm not a scientist and I'm also not an activist that's going out and talking about these things. And I look at both groups and say, you both have a lot of access to the political wings. Now, it may not be the academic scientists.
But some scientists coming out of the vaccine manufacturers was that I have seen firsthand how much the lobbying that goes on, maybe not directly from corporations, but from their proxy groups, they seem to have quite a bit of access to Congress. So to me, don't think it is as clear as the activists have the access and scientists don't. It's, think, more nuanced than that.
Kevin Folta (45:17.292)
No, no, think you're exactly right. think you do have people who represent special interests and corporate interests, absolutely. But what I guess what I'm saying is that, because I've been the guy, so maybe I shouldn't say you don't have any access, but they would contact me because my congressman was on committees and they would say, we gotta sort this out. We gotta call in someone who's kind of a neutral third party to come in here and give us what's going on. And I'd fly in there and give them the poop on what, sort through these things.
so that it was clear for them because they were getting it from both sides, know, the corporate side and the activist side, you know, where does it really sit, Fulta? And so those are great times, but that's been, you know, 10 years now since I've had to do that. But, you know, anyway, that's,
Vance Crowe (46:01.524)
There's a fascinating book called The Dictator's Handbook. And you can watch a shorter version of it called The Rules for Rulers. It's by CGP Grey. And in that, you see how politics works very plain as day, very nakedly. And I remember the first time I watched it, I was like, yeah, that's in those other countries. And then one day you look at it, and you're like, actually,
maybe that's how my country works. So I would recommend if people are feeling like things are not fair with the political system, go watch that Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey and see where you come out. Your audience may hate me for this, but it's worth taking a shot at.
Kevin Folta (46:40.47)
Is there anything else I should ask you about? I it sounds pretty good. I think we're pretty 45 minutes. Okay. Yeah, we got a long. Yeah, let me just put a lid on it then. Here we go. So Vance, it's really awesome to talk to you. Great to see you here and really appreciate your thoughts as time flies when we get to talk. So thank you very much for joining me today.
Vance Crowe (46:44.552)
I think we're pretty good. We've gone long because you and I are just...
Vance Crowe (47:01.013)
Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Folta (47:02.67)
To the listeners and the viewers. Thank you very much for enjoying another episode of the talking biotech podcast by Calabra think about your tribes and the communication within them and how much you actually believe and have faith in what you believe in and Challenge your conclusions rather than simply follow your bias really double-check to make sure that you're not falling into the wrong bin Either following somebody like Vani Hari or somebody like me, you know, make sure that you're checking this against the
of evidence to make the best decisions. So this is the Talking Biotech podcast by Calabra and we'll talk to you again next week.